4 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 184 
She tells us that the philosophy of Sia is ‘fraught with absurdities and 
contradictions,” but in the same breath observes that ‘it scintillates 
with poetic conceptions” (1894, p. 67). On the whole, her attitude 
appears to be both objective and sympathetic; compared with the pre- 
vailing view among her countrymen of that era—missionaries, army 
officers, Indian agents, traders, and just ordinary citizens—her out- 
look was the epitome of civilized sophistication. 
Mrs. Stevenson’s attitude toward science in general and toward 
ethnology in particular is nowhere made explicit. She was, of course, 
well acquainted with contemporary science as exemplified by such 
men as Maj. J. W. Powell and others. She probably merely took 
science for granted. Her job at Sia, as she saw it, apparently, was 
to describe as much of its culture as possible and make it intelligible 
to others. But she was guided by a principle which she never 
made explicit, but which was expressed in at least one curious incident 
that I will recount as follows: 
During the course of my study at Sia, I went through the files of 
photographs of the Bureau of American Ethnology. I found a 
number of them that had been published in ‘The Sia.” But my 
attention was arrested by one in particular; it was a photograph of 
the altar and paraphernalia of the Knife, or Flint, society (Stevenson, 
1894, pl. xxv). It was familiar to me; I was certain I had seen it 
somewhere. Yet it contained something that I was sure I had not 
seen before, namely, two little porcelain Chinese lions. Taking the 
photograph with me, I went to the library and looked at a copy of 
“The Sia.”’?’ To my astonishment I discovered that the photograph 
itself (pl. 1, present volume) had not been published but that a drawing 
made from the photograph had been used in ‘“The Sia.”’ The draw- 
ing was exactly like the photograph in every respect but one: the 
two little Chinese figures had been removed. Since Mrs. Stevenson 
had taken great pains to obtain photographs, and since many of them 
were used in her monograph—some inferior to the one in question— 
we can only assume that the omission of the Chinese figures was 
intentional and deliberate, and was done at Mrs. Stevenson’s request. 
Why she did this is a question for which we have no answer. She 
may have felt that it was ‘‘not Indian,” and was therefore out of 
place in that setting. But the little oriental figures had become 
Indianized; one of them is shown with a necklace of badger claws— 
as I subsequently had it identified by an informant—which is as 
un-Chinese as the figure is un-Indian. The fact that the Indian 
medicinemen adopted these little foreigners, naturalized them, and 
gave them a prominent place among their own fetishes is a signifi- 
cant bit of scientific evidence. Why Mrs. Stevenson suppressed 
